Tuesday, September 3, 2013

That picture is moss growing on what we once thought of as a cold, snow-covered continent: Antarctica. I wrote a post earlier this summer about a plants that had come in from the cold and that seemed kind of exciting. Almost sweet, in a way, that plants that had lived under the ice for so long could still bloom. But, as grist.org points out, this patch of moss is yet another signal of long-term climate change. Scientists report in the underlying article, available here, that "growth rates and microbial productivity have risen rapidly since the 1960s, consistent with temperature changes. . . " though growth seems to have tapered off in the most recent years. (They don't say why, but don't assume it means that the global climate has finished changing.)